For more than a decade now environmental groups have been using the term "greenwash" to describe gratuitous PR attempts by governments and multinationals to give their actions a tinge of sustainability. The US-based Corporation Watch even has bi-monthly greenwash awards.
Does today's "lunchtime challenge" by the Conservative party fall into that category? Leader David Cameron and half a dozen members of his shadow cabinet will be switching their electricity to renewable suppliers online. The unique selling point is that this will be an interactive press conference, with journalists offered the chance to switch their own domestic supplier too (provided they've brought a recent utility bill). Is that ethically fair on us hacks? Will any journo take up the offer? And is it all a bit of "greenwash" anyway?
Well, it's certainly quite easy to switch over to windfarm-produced electricity. I did it three years ago through Npower Juice, a Greenpeace-backed commercial scheme, although I was depressed to receive a letter before Christmas saying that prices would be rising, as they were pegged with rising gas prices (does wind get more expensive just because gas does?).
To some extent signing up to wind power is little more than an accounting sleight of hand, with companies growing their list of "green" subscribers, but the electricity is still the same stuff coming out of the national grid - notionally, you are receiving the bit generated by, say, the windfarm off North Hoyle, but it's still a statistical feelgood factor.
It would be too harsh to suggest Mr Cameron took the lunchtime challenge entirely in order to generate publicity. He does, after all, cycle to work, and his policy guru, Oliver Letwin, has pledged to make the Tories the natural choice of environmentalists by the time of the next election. Indeed, the party has joined an unofficial pact to cooperate with Norman Baker, the Liberal Democrats' deep green environment spokesman.
Of course, immediately after the lunchtime press launch, the Tories will be calling for a new generation of civil nuclear power reactors - despite today's report from a senior research fellow at the Tyndall Centre for Climate Change Research that nuclear power cannot service transport or heating requirements, so the remaining input it could have would easily be matched by energy conservation. Not to mention the carbon emissions of mining uranium and decommissioning nuclear reactors.
A case of the (centre-) left hand not knowing what the (centre-) right hand is doing?
